The More You Ignore Me

by Jo Brand

  Alice felt like an alien handmaid to these hard-faced girls, who seemed only to be interested in drinking, cackling and being penetrated so hard they were almost unable to walk. Alice still sat in her room thinking about the things that Morrissey said in his songs and feeling that the groups of schoolfriends she had awkwardly circled during her time there would not have met with his approval.

  Mark was also somewhat of an outcast although Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on why Some obvious traits sprang to mind, like his moral stance on the way in which local farmers conducted themselves and the hunts that took place across his father’s land. They had remained close friends although for several months they had been slightly uncomfortable in each other’s company, both feeling the weight of the air in the room which seemed to be pressing in on them and demanding some sort of resolution to the distance between two teenagers who have been in the most intimate of circumstances with each other. Ironically, neither could remember much about it because of the lubrication alcohol had afforded them. Alice had wondered for ages afterwards whether it would happen again and had wanted it to. Mark also wanted it to but was aware of so many stifling social conventions concerning his family’s relationship with Alice, their contempt for her ill mother and snobbery towards the gentle but useless Keith, that he could not bring himself to openly conduct a relationship with Alice for fear of his bullying father’s often physical disdain for his son’s life choices. Mark had considered suggesting he and Alice conduct a sexual relationship secretly but he knew he would eventually have to own up to her that he was embarrassed by her and so in his ridiculous male way he kept her at arm’s length. Their friendship settled back into its original pattern but with a layer of sweetness removed. This puzzled Karen, the third member of the triad, because neither Mark nor Alice had ever confided in her; something held them back. Retrospectively they were relieved they had withheld this most private piece of information as Karen began to look like and move towards the group of screeching girls that Alice was rather frightened of.

  When, some weeks after her initial visit to Dr Desmond, Alice took Gina from their house to wait for the bus to Hereford, there was a frisson of scandalous utterings in the village. The local exchange lit up as the ranks of elderly curtain twitchers jumped immediately to their phones and began the long round of passing information to the whole county about the rare appearance in public of someone who, in their opinion, should long ago have been banged up in some institution where she couldn’t cause trouble or overturn social conventions.

  Gina was like a docile animal and seemed drained of energy. Alice had got her ready that morning as you would get a child ready for school, except that she added some little touches of make-up and wound Gina’s wiry hair into an intricate bun. Not many of Gina’s clothes had escaped the telltale holes caused by cigarette burns, but Alice found a very pretty flowered dress in the wardrobe. She matched it with one of the hundreds of cardigans Nan Wildgoose had knitted during her life and some leather boots. Alice was surprised how good Gina could look when she’d been buffed up a bit.

  In fact. Gina had the effect a local celebrity would have had on the village. Many people came out of their houses on the pretext of going to the village shop so that they could walk past the bus stop and have a good look. A couple of them. Annie Wilsher and May Budd, ventured a tentative ‘Hello’. Gina completely ignored them as she had done most people, including her family, for years. In fact it was only Wobbly and Bighead’s coarse way of interacting with their fellow mortals that seemed in any way to penetrate the chemical fog she inhabited. On the days when she visited the dark little family cottage she seemed like a real person and her face lit up as Wobbly and Bighead went through the motions of their thuggish comedy double act.

  ‘How have you been then, love?’

  The words cut through Alice’s thoughts as she studied the bus timetable as if it was really interesting. She turned to May and Annie and the word. ‘Fine,’ slipped out of her mouth before she realised they weren’t talking to her. ‘She’s OK,’ she said, gesturing in Gina’s direction helplessly.

  ‘What have you been up to, love?’ said Annie, obviously deciding to persevere.

  ‘What the fuck do you think she’s been up to, travelling round the world backwards on a unicycle?’ Alice wondered if she’d said the words out loud or only thought them.

  ‘Piss off,’ said Gina, out of the blue.

  The arrival of the bus pre-empted any blustering response from the two bewildered elderly ladies whose colourless lives were only lit on occasions like this. Alice thankfully stepped on, paid their fares and sat at the back with Gina, watching the little round figures disappear into the distance, deep in conversation and planning their next dispersal of information across the county.

  Alice experienced that familiar feeling of sitting next to a stranger as the journey to Hereford progressed. The motherly smell of Gina which she could sometimes almost taste when she was a very young child had disappeared, to be replaced by a mixture of sweat and urine. It wasn’t that Gina was incontinent, it was just that she didn’t take a bath very often, her face filling with terror whenever Keith gently mooted the idea, as if he had suggested he slowly baste her on a spit. He had eventually given up the struggle and was reduced to giving her something akin to a bed bath every now and again when she was half awake and least likely to bite or punch him. Alice found herself wondering when Keith had last had sex with her mum, a distasteful subject at the best of times, and surmised it must have been years if not decades ago.

  As the bus neared its destination, in his office Dr Desmond glanced anxiously at his watch. He checked his pulse and found it had speeded up considerably in the last ten minutes. It always did this when Gina Wildgoose was approaching.

  The phone rang and made him jump. It was the receptionist telling him Gina and Alice had arrived.

  ‘Send them in,’ he said and took a deep breath.

  The pair appeared at the door, Alice lovely in a pair of frayed bell-bottomed jeans with embroidery running the length of the legs, and Gina better than he had seen her look for ages, her hair now a tamed and almost respectable mop rather than the wild, scrubby toilet brush it had been the last time he’d seen her.

  ‘Well, what can I do for you?’ he said pleasantly, hating the sound of the patronising timbre he had adopted for his interactions with patients. It occasionally slipped out at home with his wife and normally resulted in a raging torrent of abuse, the content of which invariably included his lack of respect for her and pity for the poor patients he spoke to in this way.

  ‘Well,’ Alice said, ‘my mum’s just not really living like a normal human being and I want to see if there’s anything you can do to bring back some of the enjoyment she used to have for life.’

  This succinct and poignant sentence had been rehearsed, rehashed and repeated many times over by Alice in her bedroom and on the bus.

  Dr Desmond had feared this might be the reason for their visit and his body slumped internally Christ, these people, he thought. You stabilise their family member so they can function within the family and they’re not happy with that, oh no, they want some quality of life for the poor cow.

  What he actually said was, ‘Right, so perhaps you are asking for a review of your mother’s medication.’

  Alice didn’t know what she was asking for. It was hard to put into words the ache she and Keith felt when they looked at Gina. The loss of any spark, of a quick mind — of a future. She and her dad tried not to discuss it too much for they were at odds. Keith, having borne the brunt of the devastating effects of Gina’s illness, thought that this current damped-down persona was the best they could hope for. Alice, although she could rationally see his point, wanted more for the once beautiful Gina and thought that if there was no more, she might as well be dead. But she didn’t say this to Dr Desmond. She said, ‘I don’t really know if that’s what I’m asking for because I don’t know enough about how it all works, but we
have to live with my mum and she doesn’t really talk to us, she just sits there and I don’t think that’s much of a life, do you?’

  She was right and Dr Desmond longed to throw off his professional mantle and chat to her like a friend. She seemed so sweet and earnest, but over the years his humanity had crept further and further inside him and the hard shell of his professional pronouncements had become as automatic as getting up every morning.

  ‘Look, let’s try a couple of things,’ he said. ‘I’ll change your mother’s oral drugs and we’ll reduce the volume of her injection a bit and see if that improves things at all.’

  A flicker of hope passed across Alice’s face.

  ‘OK.’ she said. ‘When will we do that?’

  ‘Well, let’s start today,’ he said, encouraged by the softening expression on her face.

  Almost simultaneously it occurred to them that they had ignored Gina completely during this exchange and they both turned to her.

  ‘How do you feel about that?’ Dr Desmond asked her. Gina was looking out of the window at an elderly lady being all but dragged by two members of staff towards a door and listening to two voices discussing how shit she was at tennis.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘We’ll change your medication a bit.’ said the spotty little creep of a doctor who had been responsible for locking her up once and now for some reason was smiling beatifically at her as if he was her saviour.

  ‘Piss off, I’m fucking brilliant at tennis,’ Gina mumbled. ‘Well, it’s better than fuck off,’ said Alice cheerfully ‘I’ll write to Dr Henty and tell her to halve the dose,’ said Dr Desmond, ‘and I’ll write your mum up for some different tablets. Let’s review it again in a month and see how we’re doing. Obviously if there are any problems you can bring her back before that or take her to your GP.’

  He scribbled on a piece of paper.

  ‘Take that to the pharmacy’ he said, handing her the prescription, and Alice rose, gently pulling Gina up with her.

  ‘What did you do today, love?’ said Keith.

  ‘Oh, just messed around at home,’ said Alice.

  ‘I went to Hereford,’ said Gina from her usual position in the corner.

  Oh shit, thought Alice. She’s going to land me right in it. ‘Yes, love,’ said Keith, not really even registering what she had said, so accustomed was he to her pronouncements having all the authenticity of a cheap romantic novel.

  Alice now had to work out how she was going to square things with Marie Henty who, she had realised over the years. was probably a bit in love with her dad. Little glances, slight breathlessness, redness of cheeks and an overwillingness to help out at any time of day or night were the symptoms she had diagnosed in the awkward GP.

  Of course, as soon as there was a whiff of anything to do with Keith, it was likely Marie would insist on talking to him directly, in the vain hope that something might happen between them. Keith, in all his unashamed blissful naivety, hadn’t got a clue, even after all this time, that Marie Henty had an unrelenting crush on him. He just thought she was a bit weird. Alice had picked it up when she was quite young, in an instinctive female way, and had immediately felt protective towards her dad. It was not that she couldn’t understand that he might want to look elsewhere for some love and comfort, she just could not help feeling censorious towards those potential feelings because Gina, after all, was still her mother.

  Alice decided on the tack she was going to take with Marie Henty. which, if it paid off, would work like a dream and if it didn’t would land her well and truly in trouble.

  The following morning found her sitting in the little surgery, flanked by two elderly ladies who had what sounded like exactly the same cough. She flicked through the dog-eared copies of The Lady, fantasising about being a nanny to some family who lived half the year in America and travelled round the world for the rest, although she suspected the reality might be tiredness and irritation with a bunch of precocious little poltergeists and their equally precocious parents.

  Alice, what a pleasant surprise. What can I do for you?’ said Marie Henty.

  ‘Well, it’s what I can do for you that is probably more important,’ said Alice, immediately grabbing back the elevated position in their duet.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Marie Henty, intrigued and wondering against hope if Alice was going to offer somehow to get rid of Wobbly and Bighead.

  ‘Let’s not beat about the bush,’ said Alice, ‘and I don’t want to embarrass you, but you really like my dad, don’t you?’

  Marie Henty was so shocked by this statement, rocketing as it did from beneath the big comfortable blanket of social convention, that her central nervous system nearly forgot to make her blush. But blush she did, as she wrestled with an appropriate and professional answer with which to counter this ever surprising eighteen-year-old’s inquiry.

  ‘Um, yes,’ she said. ‘I do like your father very much, he is a very nice man, but I’m not sure that this is an appropriate topic of conversation for us in a medical consulting room.’ Her voice had subtly changed pitch into the vaguely dictatorial yet assured tones favoured by her colleagues when faced with having to deal with an enormous emotional quagmire.

  ‘Well, we can discuss it elsewhere if you want,’ said Alice, ‘but it is linked to someone’s medical care. Not mine,’ she added swiftly.

  ‘Is your dad ill?’ said Marie Henty, a tiny edge of genuine concern creeping into her voice.

  ‘No,’ said Alice. ‘I want to talk to you about my mum.’

  ‘Right,’ said Marie Henty. ‘What does that have to do with my… apparent feelings for your dad?’

  ‘Well,’ said Alice. ‘I’m not happy about what a sad life my mum is living and I want to try and improve things for her.’

  ‘I’m in agreement so far,’ said Marie Henty.

  ‘So,’ Alice went on, ‘I want to see if scaling down her medication a bit will help and I know Dr Desmond is going to write to you to cut down her depot injection, but I’d like you to stop it for a couple of months altogether.’

  Marie Henty looked worried. Like Dr Desmond, her aim was an uneasy preservation of the status quo with regard to the psychiatric patients under her care and any threat to this made her stomach start to churn slightly.

  ‘Oh Alice,’ she said, ‘it’s quite risky, you know, because it could bring on another…‘ she searched for a neutral word, ‘attack.’

  ‘I know there’s a risk,’ said Alice, ‘but I can’t bear to think this is her for the rest of her life. She’s like a big, stranded whale with all the fun and laughter sucked out of her and I can’t believe she’ll never have fun ever again.

  ‘I know it’s difficult,’ said Marie Henty.

  ‘No, you haven’t a clue what it’s like,’ said Alice. ‘You don’t see her often enough. She’s my mum and she’s a dirty, filthy, stinking, cigarette-smoking alien in our house who sits there day after day doing fuck all. I’ve half a mind to put a fucking pillow over her face because I can’t bear to see her be this stranger who has no emotions any more.

  Marie Henty didn’t really know how to cope with this because she was in complete emotional accord with Alice, but she thought about how her colleagues, friends and the General Medical Council might view a decision that could spell professional suicide.

  ‘Look,’ said Alice, ‘I promise I will do everything in my power to push things forward between you and my dad. I’ll tell him how lovely you are, I’ll engineer opportunities for you to see each other, go out together. I’ll make him fall in love with you, if you just give me this one thing and let my mum off that fucking medication for three months, give her some life. Christ, you’re a doctor, aren’t you? Surely it’s not just about stopping her being a nuisance, is it? Is it?’

  Marie Henty’s head was swimming.

  ‘Calm down, Alice,’ she said, because she genuinely could not think of anything else to say.

  Alice stood up. ‘I will not fucking calm down.�
� By now she was half crying and half shouting. She banged her fist on the desk. ‘It’s your decision.’ Then she turned and walked out of the door.

  Immediately the phone began to ring.

  Are you all right. Marie?’ said the receptionist’s voice.

  ‘Fine,’ said Marie Henty. recovering her poise. ‘Yes, don’t worry, Joy, just some teenage angst.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Joy, ‘because Mrs Devonshire has just shit herself, I’m afraid.’

  Marie Henty wondered if there was some sort of training course Joy could go on.

  Alice walked home very fast and went straight up to her bedroom, banged the door and put on ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ on the highest volume setting and played it over and over again for about an hour. She still hadn’t got bored with the tune or lyrics and desperately wanted someone to be with who would be happy to be run over by a bus, as long as he had her.

  The next morning she found a little handwritten note on the mat.

  Dear Alice,

  Come and see me after morning surgery. About 12?

  Marie Henty.

  The next morning Alice cycled up to the village again and slunk into the surgery, well aware that the eyes of Joy, the garrulous receptionist, were upon her. She waited for well over half an hour before Marie Henty’s door opened and Marie motioned her in.

  ‘I’ve thought long and hard about it, Alice,’ she said, almost as if she was continuing the same conversation with no break. ‘and I’m prepared to try your mother without her injection for three months but no more.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Alice, ‘thank you, Dr Henty, and I promise I will fulfil my part of—’

  Marie Henty put her finger to her lips. ‘I don’t think we need to discuss that any more,’ she said. But her face said something altogether different.

  On the way home, Alice met Mark.

  ‘Not at work?’ he said to Alice.